PORT-AU-PRINCE, (Reuters) – Haiti’s quake-shattered justice system, grappling with collapsed courts, destroyed records and homeless employees, would be hard-pressed to hold a high-profile trial for 10 Americans charged with kidnapping children, Haitian lawyers and rights advocates said yesterday.
The detained American missionaries, most of whom belong to an Idaho-based Baptist church, were charged on Thursday with child abduction and criminal association. A judge was scheduled to resume a hearing on their case today.
The main courthouse in Port-au-Prince, known as the Palace of Justice, was reduced to rubble by the Jan. 12 earthquake, and the chief judge, Roc Cadet, died in the collapse along with many judiciary employees. Others are homeless and scattered.
The Ministry of Justice partially collapsed and Justice Minister Paul Denis had to be pulled from the rubble. He is now working from a small office behind the ministry.
Court records were buried in the debris and with the system effectively shut down, jails are filling with suspects arrested for looting and other crimes in the aftermath of the quake.
“It is very difficult to give a fair trial to the Americans right now. The whole system has been affected,” said Renan Hedouville, head of Haiti’s Lawyers Committee for Individual Rights. “Even the president of the court died.”
“We should not be bluffing by pretending we have the means to try that case,” he said.
Last week, judges managed to conduct a series of hearings for the arrested U.S. missionaries. But virtually no other hearings are being held by a system criticized even before the earthquake for keeping suspects jailed for months or years without hearings or trials.
“The justice system is dysfunctional,” lawyer Rodrigue Dumas said. “I believe, in these conditions, the rights of the Americans will not be protected. Therefore the judgment cannot be fair.”
Haitian authorities say the missionaries tried to take a busload of 33 children across the border into the Dominican Republic without papers proving the minors were orphans or any official permission to take them out of the country.
The case is diplomatically sensitive at a time when the United States is leading aid efforts following the earthquake last month that killed more than 200,000 people and left more than a million homeless.
Aid groups have flooded into Haiti to provide emergency food, water and medical services to survivors, and several thousand U.S. troops are on the ground to help U.N. peacekeepers and Haitian police with security.
